Never before in the history of the United States has there been a government more openly hostile to climate policy. Donald Trump and his energy secretary Chris Wright have been relentless in their effort to undermine and even reverse the spread of clean energy and climate policy, whether that means attacking the science behind climate change or blocking nearly-completed wind projects. The only surprising part about their decision to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is that it took this long to happen.
Here’s the good news for those who care about climate policy: never has this mattered less than it does right now. Sure, it would be better on a bunch of different fronts if America had a government that made evidence-based decisions and participated in global treaties and arrangements. But when it comes to clean technology, the horse left the barn a long time ago — and it just keeps picking up speed.
Both China and India just marked the first decline in coal powered energy since the 1970s, due largely to the surging supplies of clean electricity in both countries. As Carbon Brief noted in their report, “China’s recent clean-energy generation growth, if sustained, is already sufficient to secure a peak in coal power. Similarly, India’s clean-energy targets, if they are met, will enable a peak in coal before 2030, even if electricity demand growth accelerates again.”
Clean energy is also taking an increasingly substantial bite out of the natural gas market’s lunch. The cost of building new gas-fired electricity has nearly tripled in recent years, from approximately US$700-1,000 per kilowatt (kW) to about US$2,400/kW today, thanks in large part to the mismatch between the demand for gas turbines and the ability of manufacturers to crank them out. That also means businesses placing orders for them today will have to wait at least three to four years for delivery — and maybe as long as eight or nine if they’re starting a project from scratch. Renewables, on the other hand, keep getting cheaper, with the cost of battery storage falling 40 per cent last year alone. And unlike natural gas facilities, they can be built and operational in as little as 12 to 18 months.
This is more bad news for the LNG market, which is already staring down a massive supply glut. According to Wood Mackenzie, “delivered prices into Europe and Japan – already two-thirds down from the post-Ukraine war peak of 2022, at an average of US$12/mmbtu in 2025 – could halve again by the early 2030s.” For all the Conservative whining about Canada’s failure to build more LNG projects, it sure sounds like there wasn’t actually a business case for one on the east coast.
But it’s the oil market where these changes could have the biggest global impact. And here, again, we probably have China to thank. In a recent social media post, Jigar Shah, the clean energy entrepreneur who led the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office from 2021 to 2025, laid out the example it’s setting for other oil-importing countries around the world. “China isn’t betting on oil prices collapsing,” he wrote. “It’s betting on oil becoming just another commodity. Efficiency, electrification, solar, and batteries don’t create volatility—they quietly erase future demand with compounding certainty.”
Crucially, he noted, none of the developing economies now following in China’s footsteps are doing this in order to meet their Paris Accord targets or otherwise satisfy some global political directive. They’re doing it because it’s in their best economic and national security interests. “Investors still asking where the next barrel comes from may miss the more important question: how many barrels will never be needed at all and how many countries around the world have made that their top priority.”
Sorry, Donald: clean energy is going to win, whether you and the rest of the fossil fuel boosters like it or not. The only questions left are how fast it will happen — and how far behind countries like America will fall.
This is a question we would do well to spend a lot more time thinking about here in Canada. It’s one that may even start getting asked again in America in a few years, if things break back in the general direction of sanity and decency. By then, though, who knows how big China’s lead here will be — and how far the electrotech revolution it’s exporting around the world will have spread. That will have a huge impact on the economic and political trajectories of countries like Canada and the United States that are in the business of selling fossil fuels.
Far-right populists like Donald Trump will surely continue to rail against wind, solar and clean energy. They will deny any of this is happening, just as they’ve denied the science behind climate change for decades now, or find some politically convenient scapegoat to blame for the waning demand for fossil fuels. But markets, investors and businesses will just as surely ignore them in favour of pursuing their own material interests. Case in point: 2025 was the fourth consecutive year where North American banks made more money funding and financing clean energy than fossil fuels, and I would bet heavily that’s a streak that will just keep growing as we move forward.
We have reached the climate tipping point, the moment at which the transition to clean sources of energy has too much momentum to be stopped. If the Trump administration wants to relitigate the science behind climate change? Let them. And if someone wants to argue with you about whether climate change is real, or the energy transition is happening? Don’t waste your time. The battle, whether they know it or not, has already been lost.